Time lapse of shad and fish

[crappieseeker]

The following pictures are from fishing under a bridge. It amazes me how a lot of time you can fish for hours at night and the bait and fish will not be there and then they become so thick after daylight that it covers the whole screen. My problem I am having is that I can go search for some of these schools in open water around the bridge and never find any, but all of a sudden it seems they show up out of nowhere. You can see in the regular sonar view in the first few pictures the screen is blank, and the side imaging seems to show some fish of some kind. The side imaging seems to show a little more each time while the regular sonar shows nothing. Then the shot between 9 and 10 on the regular sonar shows bait and some fish from about 7 feet all the way to 22 feet. That is 15 feet of stacked shad and fish. I am assuming the darker reds are fish or either the shad so thick they give the red return. I think the fish were so full of shad they were not feeding. I only ended up with 19. Either these were all mostly shad or the crappie were there and just not biting. You can barely even see the bottom in the side view in the 9 to 10 shot due to all the bait. So where do all the shad go later in the day and at night. Do you think they break up into smaller schools and they just get real thick as they navigate the creek channel under the bridge?

[BAMA S]

Which FF did you shoot those with?

[crappieseeker]

Bird 998SI

[bluedrifter]

looks like white bass feeding on shad.

[NIMROD]

I've seen Shad shallow in schools in dead of winter near the surface. Crappie can be caught fishing shallow at night using jig and cork even in freeze'n temps. They will move up shallow I assume because Shad do. Years ago fishing yoyos with minnows for bait we set them less than 1' deep many times at night. Even when water around flooded brush 20' deep in dead on winter.

[crappieseeker]

Your right NIMROD I have caught crappie in very shallow water in the dead of winter before, even in the daytime.

[crappieseeker]

What makes you think these are white bass? I have no idea what they are.

looks like white bass feeding on shad.

[bluedrifter]

the area you described just sounds like a good spot for white bass. a bridge, creek inlet. who knows what the fish are on the screen, unless you have an under water camera. I pulled up on a brush pile that was stacked with fish. Im thinking that I'm going to where the crappie out. well I caught a few but not as good as I hoped. still marking a lot of fish in the tree top I start changing presentations. I switched to a jig and wax worm and caught nice blue gill. switched to a spoon and I caught white bass and striper, all in the same tree top.

[crappieseeker]

I had this exact same view a week or 2 before and caught 50 slabs, so it is hard to say what they are, definitely a lot of them though

[bluedrifter]

did you switch up baits to see if something else would have worked, size, color, and type of bait?